Telling Lies review: flawed but fascinating experiment in storytelling

There's a writing technique called cut-up, in which a text is broken down into small component parts and then rearranged, somewhat at random, into a new text. Cut-up has its roots in Dadaism and was used by boundary-pushing artists like William Burroughs and David Bowie. It's sometimes called aleatoric writing, which means there's an element of chance involved in the creative process; alea is Latin for dice game.

There's a sense in which most video game writers are using cut-up technique by default - even when they're trying to construct a linear narrative. As well as scripts, they build worlds and storylines out of huge databases of NPC barks, flavour text, lore snippets and branching conversations. Depending on the game design, there might be no telling when and in what order players encounter these, or whether they encounter them at all. That's where the element of chance comes in.

Sam Barlow, the writer-designer of Her Story and now Telling Lies, is doing something much more intentional, tackling this quirk of the medium head-on with his experiments in interactive fiction. In both games, a film made from Barlow's script is atomised into dozens, maybe hundreds of short video clips, which can then be searched like a database by the player using dialogue keywords. In theory, the clips can be viewed in any order; you could stumble into the denouement with your first search.

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